Monday, November 7, 2011

For my Aunt

It’s been a solitary weekend. Although I’ve been introduced
to a veritable posse of expats here in Lira, they were all out of town this
weekend, headed to Kampala for meetings, Zimbabwe for trainings or Kenya for
breaks. There are a couple locals I could call, but frankly, I’m suspicious of
their motives; one girl, the friend of a friend’s friend, asked for my number
at a dance club at the end of the evening, even though we had not even been
introduced, and the other asked if she could call me while tallying up my
purchases at the grocery store where she works. Some tell me Ugandan girls are
just shy, and won’t start up conversations with white girls they don’t know,
and their asking for my number is just an indirect way of proposing friendship.
But I don’t feel like putting myself in an unfamiliar situation right now,
don’t want to be expected to take a trio of Ugandan fillies out for beers (as
inevitably happens) and talk about clothes, and hair, and men.

My heart isn’t here.

My aunt is in the hospital. She’s normally the first one to
read my blog entries when I post them, responding each time almost at once,
with unflagging praise. Now she’s hooked up to a breathing machine, in an
induced coma, fighting an abdominal infection following an extended cancer-removal
surgery.

When I last saw her in LA, three months ago, neither of us
knew that she was sick. We wandered through the Venice Canals, ogling ducks and
display case homes. She insisted on buying me a few tops to augment my utilitarian
post-Congo wardrobe. As usual, we nibbled on vegetable slices and fruit and
hummus and a little cheese, and sipped wine with her neighbors at a nightly “cocktail
hour” in their apartment complex’s courtyard. I kept her company as she fed and
cleaned up after the sickly cat of a neighbor who was on an extended trip to
Europe. One morning the cat showed signs of kidney failure, and my aunt, the
most devoted cat lover I have ever known, tried her best to stay calm as she
made arrangements for him to be put down.

In short, her life as I knew it was carrying on as usual.

She was diagnosed in September, shortly before I left for
Uganda. Her surgery, in mid-October, went as well as could be hoped for, I was
told, although the cancer was more extensive than the doctors had previously
thought. I even spoke with her as she lay in the hospital, recovering. She
sounded like herself, upbeat, levelheaded and even a bit image-conscious
despite the sedatives. “My legs are so bloated,” she told me. “They’ve been
pumping all these fluids into me.”

And then my father emailed a few days later. My aunt had
returned to the hospital with debilitating pain in her abdomen. Apparently she
had acquired an infection during the surgery, and in her already-weakened body
it had gone systemic. She was in critical condition, and on life support. My
dad was flying out to see her.

When my 93 year-old grandmother was dying in Massachusetts
two years ago, my aunt spent the better part of two months by her side, trying
to ease her mother’s considerable physical pain, along with the anxiety and
uncharacteristic moodiness brought about by a series of opiate-based
painkillers, and her frustration with her sudden helplessness. It seems
unbelievable that my aunt now needs someone to offer the same support to her.

And here I am in a rainy town in northern Uganda, carrying
on with the day-to-day but acutely aware of the cruelty of distance, with five
more weeks to go before my evaluation is complete and I return to the US.
According to my father, my aunt’s condition, though still very serious, is
slowly improving. He says there’s a good chance she’ll fight off this
infection, and although there will be plenty more challenges ahead, we should
have a moment to breathe and regroup.

And so, to you, my lovely aunt, I send this message from
across the world. I love you. Keep fighting. Come home. Read this.